$7.5 million program begins in 2016 to repair manhole covers citywide

The city of Atlanta has announced it plans to spend $7.5 million to repair, raise and replace manhole covers across the city, starting in 2016.

“It will start in the next six months and will be a rolling project throughout the course of the four-year plan,” said city spokeswoman Jewanna Gaither. “At this time we don’t know the number of covers. It is part of the $1.2 billion capital improvement plan that addresses our aging infrastructure.”

In March the city’s voters approved a 20-year, $252 million infrastructure bond to help address that issue, but this project is not being funded by those monies.

Instead, it will be paid for through a combination of the department of watershed management’s water and sewer rates and the one-cent Municipal Option Sales Tax (MOST), Gaither said.